Banish the Bulk

Packerjohn

Nice article on gaining weight. Has a bunch of good links in it also.


http://www.t-nation.com/training/truth-about-bulking

Some of the key points

Banish the Bulk

Here's why:

1. Most train to look good, not get on stage. Is looking good a couple months a year what you're really after? Of course not. Why not look good all year long?

Attain a body fat percentage where you look lean and muscular. A male who's training for aesthetic purposes should never go above 10% body fat, which is not that lean. But it's a point where muscle definition and muscularity are sufficient to make you look very good.

That leaves you within four weeks or so of being in superb, super-lean condition.
Related:  Targeted Fat Mobilization

So what if you're at 13% body fat and don't have that much muscle? Should you bulk up? No! Cut down to 10% then gradually increase your nutrition until you reach a point where you're gaining 1.5 to 2 pounds per month. You'd gain muscle at an optimal rate while staying at 10%.

2. The leaner you are, the better your body becomes at nutrient partitioning. Lean individuals are more effective at storing nutrition in their muscle (as muscle tissue or glycogen) or in the liver (glycogen), and less effective at storing it as body fat. Leaner people can eat more without gaining fat.

3. The fatter you let yourself get, the more fat cells you produce. This makes it easier to gain fat and harder to lose it in the future, and the fatter you are, the less insulin sensitive you become.

4. Building a good looking body isn't something that happens overnight, and it's a 24-hour a day job.

It isn't limited to the hour you spend at the gym; it's a lifestyle. By eating well all year, you aren't using an extreme approach but rather changing your habits. It's much easier to lose fat when you're already used to eating well most of the time.

Wheelhouse15

This article pretty much sums up what we tell people here.